FIRST TIME IN AMERICA

This little miscellany of English verse hitherto unpublished in America is both stimulating and vexing. It consists of oddments from the pens of a score or more of poets from Edmund Blunden and Walter de la Mare to such strictly contemporaneous voices as MacNeice, Sitwell, John Betjeman, as well as a number of others less well known. Many of these poems are truly lovely, and a person passing a book stall and desiring to pick up something for a few hours of pleasant reading could have his wish fulfilled in this volume. But the contents add up to nothing more than the name,- ""first time in America""; and no strong prevailing idea holds this little string of pearls and ordinary beads together. If anything at all is proved by the assortment it is that, though the British may have yielded the palm to us in world empire, we are still far behind them in the sheer ability to make the English language sing. This book can be approached either as an agreeable but not wholly satisfactory pastime, or as an aid to researchers.